The projected improvement in finfish landings over the coming years is predicted to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the fishing ports involved, not only for the fishing boats themselves but also for the shoreside processors, freezer facilities, vessel support businesses, and fish dealers. But many historical participants, particularly fishermen based in Maine, could find themselves cut out of their fisheries by regulations that have taken away permits without creating ways for those fishermen, especially smaller, nearshore operators, to get back into the business.
Patterns of permit availability and fishing vessel access to the fish are similar in three fisheries in Maine: whiting (silver hake), inshore herring and groundfish.
These three fisheries have all seen a greatly reduced Maine-based fleet, reductions of the locally available stock, and possible recoveries of the stocks either underway or being actively pursued for the future. The effect of these changes have been to homogenize the fishing fleets of many towns to include mainly lobster boats, and to consolidate the groundfish industry for the most part to Portland.
Recent years have seen a boom in lobster populations in Maine, and lobster landings have consequently also reached record levels. In these good times it is sometimes hard to remember that Maine’s fishermen ever really fished for anything else but lobster, but the working year of the typical fisherman used to be much more diversified.
Groundfish
Groundfish in 2002 made up only eight percent, and herring two percent, of the total landed value. Lobster is indeed currently king, but many of today’s lobstermen recall spending younger years groundfishing or having fathers and grandfathers who spent at least part of the year bringing in cod, haddock, hake, flounder or herring.
Stocks of these species have been the subject of many management measures, which have been often torturously developed over innumerable meetings, and not without much anger and pain involved for the fishermen who harvest these fish. The latest round of regulations has been no exception, with anger from fishermen and conservationists alike. This time, however, things are a bit different, as there are also finally some bright spots of population recovery that are beginning to be reported in the assessments of cod, haddock, flounders, and other species. This turning of the tide of overfishing has been greeted as a sign that the management measures are at last beginning to work, and hopes are now high for a recovery on Georges Bank and in the Gulf of Maine.
Maine has had a 400-year history of catching groundfish, a group that is managed together and includes cod, haddock, hake, flounders and nine other bottom dwelling species. In the early 1990’s the state’s fleets dwindled as lobster fishing grew, and boats were encouraged through Federal permit purchase plans to sell back their often-inactive permits. Many Maine boats sold their permits at this time, balancing a short-term monetary gain against the dropping value of maintaining the restricted-access permit for the future. What vessels remained in the fishery tended to land or sell in Portland, and the fishery thus consolidated even further.
From 1994 to 2000 the number of Maine vessels permitted for groundfishing declined 51 percent. Revenue from the remaining boats in Maine declined 11 percent in this same time, while the figure for Massachusetts showed an 11 percent revenue increase over the same time. During the same time New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Connecticut all showed revenue gains from this fishery well over 100 percent.
Repurchasing these permits will be difficult, due to the significant price of both buying a permit and purchasing a boat large enough to compete in a tougher fishery. Some fishermen have bought permits, like Mattie Thomson on Monhegan, but they acknowledge the risk, and almost all permit holders have seen their number of allotted days cut in the latest management action. Due to the generally smaller boat size of the Maine fleet, the larger number of inactive permits, and the tightening of the market for the remaining licenses, many part-time, small-boat operators have bowed out, and would find re-entry to this fishery not economically viable.
John Williamson, a member of the New England Fishery Management Council, believes that “the system is not purposefully biased against Maine, but without a doubt we are consistently getting results that select against Maine fishermen.”
Lew Flagg, Assistant Commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources, states that “the state has a strong interest in maintaining historical access,” but acknowledged “some components of the fishery have declined, and without recent landings could be cut out of the process.”
Herring
In Maine’s herring fishery, weirs have given way to stop seines, then to seine gear, then to trawls, and now to pair trawling, in which two boats operate a single larger net. The result, some fishermen say, has been to push the fish further from the shore, forcing fishermen to invest in larger, more efficient gear and larger vessels. Official estimates of the herring stock show a greatly increasing, underutilized stock, but those figures may not be as they seem for the inshore Maine area, known as Area 1A. “This area has seen a large increase in effort, when you think of the fact that these trawl boats can work day and night,” (seine boats work only at night) says Dana Rice, member of the New England Fisheries Management Council and longtime Downeast fisherman. “If everything was as rosy as the bean counters say for Area 1A, then everybody would not be working harder, and they are, I can tell you that,” he declares. This increase in pressure on the fishery has favored larger, more efficient vessels that have the capital to make the gear transition.
“We used to have someone in every harbor catching herring and groundfish, but now that effort is focused in just a few places, and involves fewer boats” says Rice.
Whiting
Whiting, also known as silver hake, supported a fishery of huge proportions in Maine in the postwar years. In the late 1960s the fishery averaged landings of around 26.5 million pounds a year. For reasons that are still unknown, the fishery dropped suddenly below 10 million pounds in 1971, and shot down to less than a quarter of a million pounds by 1977, and has averaged less than a million pounds for the last twenty years. In the last three years this fishery has hovered at around 33,000 pounds (a decline of over 99.5% from the 1960’s.) Whether the cause was environmental changes or overfishing, the fishery did indeed shift south, and boats have been working the whiting stock in the mid-Atlantic.
Recently the fish seem to be returning to the northern part of their range, and many worry that if this should happen Maine boats would not be able to get back into this activity due to not having a record of landings from the last 20 years or so. The significant historical record for Maine boats, even though it may not have been that long ago in terms of ecological shifts or environmental recovery, is considered ancient history in management circles. In this potentially overcapitalized fishery, with already enough large trawl boats in New England to catch the total allowable catch many times over, additional vessels will be neither welcomed nor needed, and new entrants will be strongly discouraged, potentially including Maine vessels.
Maine regulators have recognized the potential threat to access that the restructuring of permits holds for the state. However, there may be little they can do about this, as the regulation takes place in a multi-state environment, and representatives for the particular states naturally tend to favor their own interests. The lobster fishery shows the type of geographically distributed harvest that many think is best for both the environmental and social environments, but the option for other fisheries to be structured like this may be getting squeezed out by economic circumstances. This issue has even attracted the attention of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who has sent a letter to the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service that starts “I write to express my concern regarding a [policy] that is causing Maine’s groundfishing fleet to lose more Days-at-Sea time than any other fleet in New England.” New England Fisheries Management Council member Williamson puts it even more sharply, stating “Maine is simply getting the door shut on it, and in my opinion there is nothing in Amendment 13 that will address this.”